There can’t be many people who haven’t heard about the current PlayStation Network woes. It’s a hugely negative story for PlayStation which is getting attention from national mainstream press and causing competitors to gloat.
We tried to lighten the mood slightly with a few clumsy jokes on Friday but now it’s three days later and the PSN still hasn’t risen. We’re worried you might be getting a bit too frustrated and unhappy so we thought we’d look at what improvements might be implemented while Sony has its servers switched off.
Increased security. This one is a certainty, Sony haven’t given much information about what they’re doing and this is the one thing they’ve been clear about. The new PSN will be stronger and more resilient to the kind of attacks which brought the old PSN down. More security is always a good thing, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of actually using the service.
More servers. This is very possible and would definitely be welcomed. While the PSN is down, they could be adding to their servers so that capacity is increased and the whole thing works more smoothly in the future. This attack on the PSN might be the thing that finally gets us stable multiplayer launch weekends on the beautiful black box along with even faster download speeds and updates that are quick enough to largely silence those that constantly complain about their frequency.
New features. People have taken the opportunity to postulate that Sony might be using the down time to pack in new features – specifically, cross game chat – to the Network services. We think that this is unlikely. It is possible, however, that newly strengthened servers might be better able to handle increased traffic and that might make new features more likely in the near future. We would expect to see this sort of thing in a big firmware update at a high point in the media calendar – like around E3 time.
Compensation. Like it or not, this situation has been a PR disaster for Sony. We’re fairly sure that down time on the network is accounted for when you sign up but customers still have a right to be disappointed that a service they pay for (be it via the initial console purchase, PS+, PSN games that require authentication to run or third party partnerships like LoveFilm, MLB.com, etc) has been missing for so long. One way Sony could help calm the growing outrage is to give something away. To be fair, PlayStation have been very generous with their PS+ service and some heavy discounting recently so we think this is very likely. What they offer their loyal fans is a subject of pure conjecture but we would expect their generosity to be on full display fairly soon after the network hums back into life.
So there we have it, this is all pure speculation at this point but it’s better to speculate on positives than to dwell on the negatives, right? What would you like to see from the new, improved PlayStation Network when it comes back on?
PoorPaddy89
Im surprised that fat guy on youtube hasnt made another vid. The one that went mental when fat ps3 clocks screwed up.
teflon
I think the only one we can bank on is increased security.
More servers can be added at any time, really, so I don’t think they’ll bother with that at this point, and would be more focused on getting the ones they have now (which are fine 99% of the time anyway) shored up and secure.
New features are also out the window. The limitations on many wishes are actually client side and RAM based, rather than server side, and they’re already working on a set path for adding stuff anyway. If anything this hiccup is going to push features BACK.
Compensation would be nice, but again I’m not so sure what we’d see. PS+ gets a ton of content already, so they might bundle in an extra game next month there, but for average joes, they’ll get little to nothing, I suspect. They haven’t paid a subscription for the service, and I’ve no doubt there’s something in the EULA and ToS that says outages can be at any time without any prior warning.
There might be a good will gesture of some sort, but I don’t know what it could be, really.
Daywalker
Security is a shoe in. Why spend all this time having it offline when they could just put up a ‘backup’ of the PSN before it crashed? To make a harder, better, faster, stronger one is why. If not then they’ve failed themselves, they’ve failed the game devs, and most of all, the’ve failed us.
Flightx
with the psn down i’ve been wondering around all the playstation sites looking for info. the blog,on the main site and on the forums.
i have tried to post a comment on the official forum but i can log into it. how are the people posting now logging into it?
nemesisND1derboy
The sign-in page is under maintenance, but anyone who was signed in previously can still post.
The Lone Steven
I doubt Sony are adding any new features while they rebuild it. They are proabaly more concerned with reinforcing PSN and getting it back up. I imagine that the paid services that require PSN will get an extra month free. I doubt they will give non-plusers anything.:(
dammspi
I expect Sony to give me a free platinum to a game of my choice :)
TURRICAN-808
Massive discounts across the PSN Store would cover it. I feel bad for those people that bought new games recently that had multiplayer as one of their strongest selling poinmts – Portal 2 co-op play being one of them.
GTRsannin
There could be something new coming cause it is a rare situation that they can shut the whole PSN down like this all be it under such bad circumstances although it’s not like it’s the end of the world i would be more pissed off if it was down for a couple of months or so
megatron576
so the new psn means we will have 2 make a new account and start the trophies again please tell me if this ain’t going 2 happen.
Sab7786
for me i aint really fussed about any compensation, i just the network up and running again.
TSBonyman
When it comes back up i don’t expect any new features, maybe new ToS but i hope that trophy syncing will be improved as it’s been failing a lot for me recently.